


Twenty-Five Days

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Literally everyone is an OC, Original Character(s), This isn't going to make any sense if you haven't read the rest of the Voltron: Duality series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 04:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9640166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: Carmen Mendoza might just have it in her to hate Karen Holt.It might just be justified.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place leading up to/during chapter 9 of _Someplace Like Home_ , giving a different take on the events on Earth. Again, if you haven't read up to that point, none of this is going to make sense.

No matter how hard she searched, Carmen Mendoza could not pinpoint the moment she stopped being a good mother.

Maybe it was the day Lance died, and all Carmen could think was, _Thank god it wasn’t one of mine._

It was selfish, and it was cruel, and she didn’t even mean it—not really, not once she’d had half a second to analyze the thought. She was as devastated about the accident as the rest of the family, and she immediately dropped what she was doing to go to her brother-in-law’s house. Still she couldn’t ignore the hammer-fall of relief when she heard Sebastian’s voice on the other end of the line, or when Val walked in the front door and fell into Carmen's waiting arms.

Maybe that wasn’t when she became a terrible mother. Maybe it was later, after the funeral, after they’d all tried to get back some semblance of normalcy, when Val and Rosario got into a fight because Val had told Luz and Mateo that Lance was still alive. Rosario had ordered Val out of her house, and Carmen had stood by, tacitly taking Rosa’s side.

Or maybe it was the weeks after that, when Val began to drift. She still called every few days, she showed up on Friday for family dinner and smiled with her brother and made up with Rosario and conspicuously avoided being alone with Luz and Mateo.

But otherwise, Carmen didn’t talk to her daughter. She was so lost in her own grief, so grateful that Val was finding a way to heal instead of hurting them all with her continued denial, that she couldn’t even say for sure what day Val went missing.

Someone called Carmen looking for Val on the seventh, but that was Friday, and Friday was family night, and Carmen didn’t pay the call much mind until Val failed to turn up that evening.

Carmen spent the evening calling Val and leaving increasingly frantic messages. When she hadn’t heard back by morning, she went to Val’s apartment--and again received no answer. She tried the paper next, only to learn that Val no longer worked there.

That was when the fear set in and Carmen went to the police, frantic and barely coherent. She knew it was the fresh wound of Lance’s death that made her panic, but she couldn’t help it. Any number of things could have happened. A car accident, a serial killer, a jealous ex. The possibilities compounded in Carmen’s mind, spilling over in a torrent of tears as the policeman took down her story with a calm that bordered on apathetic.

“They think she ran away,” Marco said when they got home from the police station. Rosario and Ramon had stayed with Sebastian, who’d returned once more from UCLA. He needed to be here, he'd said, until they found out what had happened to Val. Carmen went to the back bedroom to check on Luz and Mateo, who were happily watching cartoons, oblivious to the grown-ups’ dark mood.

But Carmen could hear the conversation going on in the other room, and her husband’s voice threatened to bring on a new flood of tears.

Sebastian let out a strangled sound. “Ran away? She wouldn’t—you can’t be serious!”

“She lost her job two weeks ago,” Marco said. “The police—the police think she left the city to start over somewhere else.”

“Without telling us?” Sebastian cried. “She wouldn’t just _leave_!”

But the police remained insistent.

Oh, they carried out an investigation, interviewing family, friends, coworkers. They searched her apartment and found no signs of robbery or an argument. They searched for her car, but the last time it was seen, she was leaving Carlsbad, and they took that as proof of their own ridiculous theory.

“Someone took her,” Carmen insisted, every time she spoke with a police officer. It didn’t seem to matter. They just kept repeating the same tired excuses each time. No signs of foul play. No suspects. No reason to think she was hurt, every reason to think she’d just… _left_.

As they were leaving the police station a week after Val went missing, Carmen overheard a snatch of conversation between the officer they’d just spoken with and her partner.

“You’d think they’d be happy to hear she ran away. If she _was_ kidnapped, she’s long dead by now.”

The words stole the breath from Carmen’s lungs. She was sobbing before they reached the car.

* * *

Two weeks after Val’s disappearance, Carmen was bombarded with calls from strangers demanding to know what she thought of Karen Holt, whether she agreed that Mitch Iverson had been behind Val’s disappearance, whether the police were going to charge him with anything.

Carmen hung up on each caller with increasing unease, questions compounding in her gut. After the eighth call in fifteen minutes, she turned off her ringer and disconnected the landline.

It was Sebastian who found the clip.

Karen Holt—a lawyer, according to the news anchor, and not someone Carmen had ever met—stood toe-to-toe with a man in a military uniform Carmen only vaguely recognized from Family Day at the Galaxy Garrison.

_Val Mendoza was last seen on Garrison property eighteen days ago. I don’t know if she’s dead or not, but until you give me reason to believe otherwise, I have to assume someone on your staff was responsible for her disappearance._

The horror was slow to set in. How Mrs. Holt had known about Val’s disappearance… how the woman had learned she’d been to the Garrison the day she disappeared… What she was doing confronting the Garrison herself, Carmen didn’t know.

And why the hell hadn’t she gone to the police? With that information, maybe they would have taken the missing person case seriously. Maybe Val would be here now instead of dead in a ditch God only knew where. But no, Mrs. Holt had decided to keep quiet--and for what? Some kind of publicity stunt? Some ploy to attract new clients?

Carmen was almost glad when Mrs. Holt finally called her a week later.

“Mrs. Mendoza? Hi. This is Karen Holt.”

“The lawyer?” Carmen asked, her voice taught with a rage that had been building since she’d first seen the woman’s face on the news. That Mrs. Holt’s own kid had died with Lance in the training accident did nothing to cool her anger.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then: “Yes. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You _should_ be.” Twenty-five days. Twenty-five _goddamn_ days since Val had gone missing, and _now_ Karen Holt decided to come to Val’s family? If she was hoping for civility, she was several weeks too late.

“I’m sorry, what?” Mrs. Holt’s voice was soft with surprise and confusion, and Carmen felt a twisting of dark pleasure at throwing the lawyer off her game.

“You _should_ be sorry,” Carmen hissed. “You were the one who sent my daughter in there? You got her killed?”

She’d been slow to believe it, even with all the proof Sebastian kept finding on Karen Holt’s website. Evidence that the Garrison had been behind Val’s disappearance. Evidence the accident that had claimed Lance’s life had been avoidable at best and at worst, not an accident at all.

Even now, Carmen didn’t know what to think. Maybe the Garrison was responsible for Val’s death (it had to be _death_ , after nearly a month; Carmen had seen the statistics on kidnappings, and she knew better than to hope Iverson had kept her daughter alive.)

It didn’t matter. The Garrison was untouchable, unreachable, and Karen Holt was right here, a ready target for all Carmen’s pent up frustrations.

“Val is _dead_ because of you,” she spat, interrupting Mrs. Holt’s attempts at self-justification.

Behind her, a bare foot squeaked on a loose floorboard. “Is that her? The lawyer? Does she know where Val is?”

Sebastian’s voice, stretched thin with a hope that had long since deserted the rest of them. Carmen had to force herself not to snap at him.

“Go to your room, Sebastian,” she said--in Spanish, because Karen Holt had already stuck her nose too deep into Mendoza family business. Carmen wasn't giving her anything else. “I’ll deal with this.”

Sebastian hesitated, looking closer to ten than twenty, but he went, and Carmen closed the office door behind him.

Mrs. Holt’s breathing, shallow and shocked, still echoed through the phone, and it wasn’t hard to fall back into the anger. “It wasn’t enough I had to lose a nephew?” Carmen demanded. “Now you take my daughter. Who next? My son? Little Luz?”

She only stopped because the pain had closed in around her neck like a noose, an all-consuming ache that left no room for other considerations. Her family was falling apart, slipping away, all of them broken by the twin tragedies.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mendoza,” Mrs. Holt said, soft. Not quiet apologetic, though. “I know this is hard. I know! My whole family is missing.”

“They aren’t _missing_ , Mrs. Holt. Your family is _dead_.” She’d been waiting a month for someone to say it. The police, the neighbors, her own family. Weeks of everyone trying to sugar-coat the truth, and now it was out there in the open. The Holts were dead. _Val_ was dead.

It left Carmen feeling more hollow than she’d expected.

“Your family is dead,” Carmen repeated, her voice flat and lifeless to her own ears. “And mine is too. Unless you can bring them back, I have nothing to say to you.”


End file.
